Blogger Interview: Mattress Police

Hey Everyone, I'm wrapping up the week with an interview from another great blogger, and now published author. You may know him from his blog full of 'anti-social commentary,' Mattress Police. I give you Rob "Diesel" Kroese.

Tell us about yourself, Diesel.
I'm the guy who shows up at family gatherings with a book tucked under his arm. If I see a sign on the side of the freeway with a misplaced apostrophe, it can take over my entire consciousness until I'm six miles past my exit. Fortunately, I sort of fell into a job doing software development, for which I get paid very well, and which allows me to spend a fair amount of time writing - for which I get paid very poorly. I'm also a husband, father, Christian, reforming cynic and incurable smartass.

You call your blog ‘insipid rantings’ and ‘antisocial commentary.' So what’s your blog really about?
My blog is really about whatever happens to be going on in my head on a given day, although I try very hard not to be self-indulgent.

When I blog about a controversial subject, I’ll make it into a joke by either arguing precisely the opposite of my actual opinion or by exaggerating my own standpoint so much that it's unrecognizable, so it's virtually impossible to tell what I actually believe.

Most of the time, though, my posts are just ridiculous pursuits of some pop culture notion that most people wouldn't give a second thought. For example, I once ran across this quote from a microbiologist: "If an alien came from space and studied the bacterial counts, he probably would conclude he should wash his hands in your toilet and crap in your sink." Well, the notion of aliens crapping in one's sink is so rife with comic possibilities that that post pretty much wrote itself, as you can read here.

Why did you get started blogging?
I literally started blogging as a joke. Some friends at work coaxed me into setting up a MySpace page, which was the thing to do at the time. I set about uploading pictures of myself, listing my favorite movies and TV shows and picking a profile song…. and then I remembered I wasn’t a fourteen year old girl. Why was I doing this? Who was I trying to impress by listing Def Leppard and Audioslave as two of my favorite bands? I started over, selecting movies (Steel Magnolias, Iron Eagle, Mercury Rising) purely for their metallurgical properties. I listed my interests as moping, procrastinating, and shirking. I cited Batman, Wolverine and Immanuel Kant as my heroes. And then I started to write my first blog post. It started:

“I was accosted this morning by a large sea turtle. I had arisen early to steal the neighbor’s newspaper (I cancelled my subscription when I learned the editor was a freethinker and a bigamist), and just as I stepped outside, I saw it. The turtle must have been a good 5 feet long and 3.5 feet wide (these are shell measurements), and I would estimate that it weighed at least 200 pounds. I certainly couldn’t lift him, and I’m hella strong. I attribute my exceptional strength to a daily regimen of vitamins and backgammon, although I’m also 1/32 Apache Indian, so that’s sort of an X factor.”

After a few months, I moved the blog to MattressPolice.com. And yes, "Mattress Police" is a reference to Fletch.

It's easy to see you had early potential. I had a prototype blog on MySpace too. How long did it take to get your friends to really call you ‘Diesel?’
About 4 years ago, I worked at a company where there was another Rob, who was a real [jockstrap]. I would get introduced as "Rob," and I would have to immediately clarify, "But not the [jockstrap] Rob." And then I would have to clarify THAT by saying, "I'm not necessarily saying that there IS a [jockstrap] Rob, but if there is, I'm not him." That got old pretty quick, so my co-workers asked me what I'd prefer to be called. I had an answer at the ready, as one should for just such occasions. I said, "I always wanted to be called 'Diesel.'" That's what they started calling me, and it stuck. Now people just assume it's my real name.

For example, a while back I decided that I needed to come up with nicknames for all my co-workers. I started handing out nicknames, like "Sparkles," "Pipes" and "Spokes." I was explaining the origins of all these names to another co-worker, and she replied, "Ok, but what's YOUR nickname, Diesel?"

You’ve moved on from your blog to a self-published book. What’s ‘Mercury Falls’ about?
Mercury Falls started around the same time I started blogging. Ironically, at the same time that I began indulging my smartass instincts on MattressPolice, I was selected to be a deacon in my church. I felt like I was developing sort of a split personality, writing these caustic blog posts and then heading off to a meeting where we would make decisions about how to best help the downtrodden in our town. This led me to the idea of a well-intentioned angel who was also something of a smartass. I decided to set the book at the beginning of the Apocalypse to ratchet up the stakes a bit, and put Mercury into some tough spots to see what would happen.

I’ve bought the book, and can say you can’t go wrong with it. The humor is so dry, it's like eating a box of sand...but in a good way. A very good way. Imagine the sand being delicious instead of terrible, like Little Debbie's. Sand that is so good, it's like a snack treat. Yeah. That's your book. Just pretend that analogy worked.

You say your blog was taking over your life. What does someone so full of insipid rantings do, while not subjecting strangers to their opinions on the internet?
Well, I read more, for one thing. And I'm trying to teach myself the guitar. And once I can stop obsessing about the success of Mercury Falls, I am going to write another book.

You are acquainted with ‘Crummy Joel’ of ‘Crummy Church Signs.’ Tell us about that.
Joel is one of the first people I "met" online when I started blogging. He's a very cool guy, and he and I share similar worldviews. We're both Christians and we take that very seriously, but we don't take ourselves -- or anything else -- very seriously. Crummy Church Signs was one of my absolute favorite blogs, but I can totally empathize with Joel's need to call it quits. He's moving on to better things as well, and hopefully you'll have a chance to talk to him about that.

I think there needs to be more of us around who take God seriously, but not so much ourselves.

You have a very manly physique, kind of like Daniel Craig, but with no neck. How do you stay in shape?
Photoshop. And neck-reducing pills.

I work and work at the gym and can't achieve the neck results you have. My hat is off to you.

Be sure to get anti-social with Rob, check out his blog, Mattress Police, and then think about buying his book Mercury Falls.

Speed Dating with Jesus

Dating can be pretty brutal.

I'm glad my dating days are behind me. Not that they numbered in the hundreds, or even the dozens...Actually, there were only a select few days I can technically call 'dating' days.

Anyway, dating can be fun. But for every fun date, there's probably a bunch you know will never go anywhere. And the longer people date, the more many of them want to just get down to business and find someone already.

As much as we don't like to admit it, people are pretty judgemental. In fact, they say that people have pretty much made up their mind about someone within the first minute of a date. That's some efficient judging! If it's a bad first impression, it can be a rough night...

"Well, there she is. Hmmm...is that really what she's wearing? Decided that looked good, huh? Probably decided to make up for the dress with the excessive body spray. Okay, begin awkward conversation. Questions, questions... She answers a question and doesn't ask one back. What's up with that? What time is it? 6:02. We're two minutes into this thing, and I'm dying already. Is someone texting me? No? Please, someone text me. Just keep drinking water. You'll have to go to the bathroom soon enough. Okay, I can do this. Only two hours and fifty-eight minutes to go. I promised her a movie, so we don't have to talk...What's with her hand? I hope she doesn't want me to hold it. Uh-oh, she's ordering the Baja Biggie Basket. She must be high maintanence."

That's why speed dating apparently works. I never speed dated, but I understand the idea. Six minutes with each of 12 dates in one night...

"Yikes what's up with that tie? Did your father give it to you? Oh, he's trying to be funny. Well, at least he's trying. Think he could've asked the barber to take care of that neck, though? Okay, just try to keep smiling. Good, the timer went off. That saved a lot of time. Next!"

Speed dating eliminates the hassle of having to go through a whole evening with someone you immediately know you don't want to spend time with. If you're looking for someone, it can take months of traditional dating to find a match. Speed dating lets you get a first impression, and then you can come back for more if you're interested.

That got me thinking about visiting churches. Trying to find a church is a total pain. It can take months as you visit one church at a time, each weekend. If you're really on your game, maybe you can squeeze two churches into a weekend. Most Sundays I visited churches in college felt like bad dates...

"Well this is a nice looking building...walking in the front door...oh no, it smells like old people and Glade. Okay, I can deal with this. This greeter is trying to 'plug me in' to some group. I just want to go to church, not sign a contract, sir. He probably sells used cars for a living. The worship leader looks way too happy. Oh I see, he must not have been impressed with our 'Good morning,' so he's making us do it again. I wonder if I could slip out and go across the street to see what the Baptists are doing. Hmmm...they have the offering baskets on sticks. That's fun. Oh, I see they have the little communion cups too. Those are cute. What is this preacher saying? Is it time to go? No, we're having an altar call...of course. Three verses later...still going?"

So I've got an idea to float to you. As much as we like to say that all churches are part of the body of Christ, people still have really narrow ideas about what they'd like in their church. And if people are judgemental about dates, they're also judgemental about churches.

What if we could speed date our churches? Hear me out. Meet 10 pastors and worship leaders in 90 minutes in a speed date style church service. It's in a neutral place and people get a sense of the music and preaching without having to commit an entire Sunday visit to a place they know isn't a good fit as soon as they walk in the door.

The Good:
People narrow down churches and find the right one quickly.

The first impression of a church isn't a building.

Churches with ugly buildings or bad locations are on equal footing with others.

People and might discover a church they'd never visit otherwise.

The Bad:
A person can sum himself up in five minutes. A church can't.

A church might have awesome people besides the pastor. You don't get to meet them.

You might get a 'cult of personality,' where people are sold on the pastor...because surely that doesn't happen already. Everyone goes Joel Osteen's church for the giant spinning globe on the stage.

People who speed date are stereotypically cold-hearted business professionals with little faculty for genuine human emotion. Do we want to model church after that?

Still, seems better than people making a first judgement of a church by its building. As a pastor of a church with no building, I think that sounds okay.

If people trust something as important as finding their spouse to speed dating, is it possible for church?

What say you? If you were looking for a church, would you go to a church speed date night? Or is the concept an abomination to the body of Christ.

I Just Fixed Health Care

A couple of weeks ago, we talked animals, medical malpractice, and veterinarians. Turns out, a lot of you are animal lovers. I hope you're also health insurance lovers, because that's what we're talking about today.

I got lots of interesting responses to that post. A really interesting comment said that I've been brainwashed by the insurance companies.

I teased you with a comment in that post that a big reason our medical industry is in the shape it's in is because many Americans are such big babies. I thought I'd follow up on that. Here's is my complete, one page bill which I am preparing to send to Congress to help fix healthcare:

My Solution to Fixing Healthcare

1.) Get rid of Insurance.
2.) That's it. Problem solved.

I'll be perfectly blunt. I hate health insurance. If you work for an insurance company, sorry, but I don't hate you. I also hate Indian food. I have no problem with Indian people, just their food. Health insurance is like Indian food.

Last year, my wife had a minor procedure in the hospital. Good thing we pay astronomical premiums and thus have a relatively low yearly deductible...

...Oh wait, all this stuff doesn't count toward the deductible, as I can now see in these hundreds of pages of fine print! Well I don't mind paying twice what I thought our deductible was for a minor procedure! That's what insurance is for! We pay for insurance, and then pay for our health care anyway, just so the poor insurance company won't be burdened by us little people!

In reality, I'm not saying we should really abolish all insurance. But every argument about health care is a debate about how to pay off these astronomical prices, and no one is talking about just eliminating the really expensive, useless middle-man. So I will.

In my ideal world, we'd go back in time 50 years. So all I need to fix health care is a time machine. I've got the high bid on eBay right now...

Fifty years ago, people didn't have all the insurance of today. At the most, average people had catastrophic insurance. So if you had to go to the hospital, you'd be helped out. But if you were just going to the doctor, you paid for that yourself like everything else you'd buy.

A peculiar thing happened. Doctors raised their prices, as every business does. And people cried about how it was getting too expensive. And who should come to save the day? Insurance! So gradually, people got the idea that health care is something someone else should pay for. They gladly paid someone else to pay for their healthcare, so they'd never have to think about if a trip to the doctor or some pills was really necessary. (That's the crybaby part.)

Please refer to the figure to the left, the first health insurance agent, Actuary McMonkey McBean, complete with car full of money spent on unnecessary cosmetic surgeries.

But what if people didn't buy insurance for doctor's visits? What if they decided to buck up and pay for their own health care? They wouldn't go to the doctor so much, because they wouldn't be able to afford it. And what would happen? The same law of supply and demand that has dictated every other business model since the invention of money would take over and doctors would have to lower their prices to stay in business!

What if McDonald's suddenly raised the price of Big Macs to $63.00? (That's about 20x the price, for you non-Americans and your non-crap money.) People wouldn't buy them. If McDonald's wanted to stay afloat, they'd drop the price to a point people were willing to pay.

But say I'm an industrious insurance salesman. I could offer to pay for someone's $63.00 Big Mac (for a smaller fee.) I've now created a safety net for McDonald's, where they don't have to follow the universal rules of economics. They can keep their high prices, and the only thing Big Mac eaters have done is given lots of money to people who don't deserve it. Sounds absurd, but if people decided that Big Macs were that important, it could happen.

That's [one of] the problems with healthcare as I see it, (and it's the same problem that has caused virtually every American financial bubble in history.) Healthcare is not worth what is being paid for it. Insurance creates a safety net where the prices never have to come down, because there will always be someone to pay those high prices.

Would lowering prices hurt healthcare workers? Yes, the same way that saving the American auto industry has hurt auto workers. That's just how it goes. I'm sure there will still be enough money to go around.

That's just my solution, and I'm not saying it's a complete one, or even a well-researched one. It just makes sense to me. There will always be people who fall through the cracks who need help though, and I don't want to sound like I'm saying 'tough luck' to them. What say you? Do you like your insurance? Hate it? Don't have it? Are you an insurance worker? If you're outside the US, what positive/negative things might we learn from your country's system? Anyone want to pay me to buy them McDonald's?

Three More Blog Commandments

Blogging can kill you.

Really, I mean that. Don't let it happen to you.

Wednesday, I shared with you 3 rules in keeping a blog that gives you what you want. I was so excited to get feedback from all you bloggers, especially some brand new bloggers who are just starting out telling their stories. Today, I'm finishing up my week of celebrating my year of blogging with three even more important rules to keep when telling your story on a blog. In fact, these aren't even rules, these are commandments, the thou shalts of blogging.

Telling Your Story: Three Commandments

Thou shalt not let thy blog control thyself.
If you want to write a coherant blog that others will probably read, it will take time. For me, it involves keeping a notebook of little ideas which may never be used. It's writing posts three times a week, which takes about an hour, if I'm feeling creatively juicy. It's responding to comments and visiting new commentor's blogs as well as visiting my favorite blogs.

Actually, writing your blog could turn out to be the least time-intensive activity in blogging. You can spend endless hours keeping Wednesday's Rule Two: "Make Friends," trying to keep up with the rest of the blogosphere. This commandment's also different from Rule Three: "Don't Make Noise," because you can spend lots of time blogging though you aren't writing on your blog.

And all the while, your spouse will be wondering why blogging is so much more important to you than sleeping regular hours or watching Dancing with the Stars as a family, and will perhaps wonder if you have met a sultry Italian blogger with whom you are having a steamy online romance. Blogging is a convenient hobby because the computer is always near. But for the sake of yours and your family's sanity, you must contain your blogging into blocks of time, and then not touch it. For me, this is the hardest rule to follow.

The things you own end up owning you, including your blog. Pretty soon, you're not writing your story. Your blog is writing you. You're looking at the world through a lens of 'would that make a good blog post?' If you let your blog run your life, you will burn out, get writer's block, or cause your spouse to throw your computer out the window.

This leads me right into my next commandment.

Thou shalt do very interesting things.
While it's important to keep up with the blogosphere's activities to keep the inspiration going, it will only take you so far. If you are starting to resemble a pale-faced teenager living in his parent's basement, butt fused to his chair, you will still probably run out of interesting things to say, not to mention self-respect. It's a scientific fact that prolific writers are totally full of themselves, so a lack of self-respect would be quite detrimental to writing.

Personal stories are often some of the most interesting, entertaining, and human of all blog posts. Creating personal stories requires leaving the blog long enough to do normal human activities, like going out in public. Remember: Stories happen when you aren't looking for them.

If you don't do very interesting things, you won't be a very interesting person, and you'll get writer's block.

One last commandment...

Thou Shalt Improve Thyself
It's pretty much a waste of time to practice the same notes on a piano for years. You need to keep pushing yourself to get better. Blogging can be a daunting world. There's a lot to know. You don't have to know it all at once. But there are answers to all your questions out there. So improve your craft.

Improve your writing. Learn how to write ideally for a blog. There are lots of websites that will tell you some ideal formats for blog writing.

Improve your blog design, if you're inclined. This one's important to me as an artist with no web design background. My blog is my little garden that I keep. I know it's not the prettiest thing around, but I try. Blog sites like Wordpress may be the sexy prom queens, but even homely old Blogger can blossom with the help of sites like BloggerBuster.com. People are always coming up with new ideas to improve blogging, so you never have to let your site get dusty and frumpy with age if that's important to you.

Improve yourself, outside of blogging. Read a book, exercise, learn to cook, whatever. If you're a Christian, deepen your faith life. Blogging should never come at the expense of yourself.

What commandments would you add? What has been the hardest for you? What has helped you the most in your blogging hobby?

Don't forget to spread the word about my big prize giveaway too! Looks like I'll be giving out a few prizes, but I want to give out lots more, so tell your friends!